Our Authors, ElsewhereWebsite: http://thefirestillburning.wordpress.com
Profile: I am a physicist with a musician wife and a daughter who got the best of both of us. I am a 3rd generation RLDS member who prefers to reserve the modern term of Community of Christ for something bigger and more permanent than a religious denomination. I am someone who is grateful for all who seek to be faithful, as they understand faithfulness, in fulfilling their role in that Community. I am a writer of occasional scientific and religious papers and many, many, many reports, plans, forecasts, speeches, and proposals destined to be seen only by government bureaucrats and their political supervisors.
The headline is clear. Community of Christ will provide sacramental ordinances of marriage, commitment ceremonies, and ordination independent of sexual orientation in the USA. Specifically, after two days of discussion, the USA National Conference formally approved by a required 2/3rds majority the following recommendations to the First Presidency and Quorum of Twelve: The 2013 USA [...]
Pending the birth of Princess Kate’s baby, Lady Cosima Rose Alexandra Windsor is currently 24th in line for the British throne. Lady Cosima is the nearly three-year-old great granddaughter of a grandfather of the current queen. I didn’t know that, and I really wouldn’t care, but I did easily look it up, and I could do [...]
The Ten Commandments was one of the first Biblical epics to command a mass audience, and so my parents took me into downtown Detroit as a boy to be sure I saw it in its full widescreen glory in one of the few theaters capable of so screening it. The movie was well worth the [...]
Human brains naturally use locations in space and time to make sense of events. Why should we expect eternal spirits to follow that protocol? The question has always bothered me. What follows is speculation about a different way of looking at the relationship between the physical and the spiritual than the Restoration faiths adopted in [...]
Salt Lake City sees General Conference every six months. In the CofChrist, “World” Conference occurs every three years, and 2013 is the lucky year. A Community of Christ World Conference is far more of a legislative exercise than its Utah LDS analogue. It features worship, of course, and normally will have approval to changes and [...]
Mystery guest number 1 was never a practicing Catholic. Mystery guest number 2 never believed in Temple rites. Now, there’s a good conspiracy theory. Sometimes a conspiracy theory turns out to be true. There is even a class of crime for which people go to jail that starts out “conspiracy to commit…”. But the conspiracy theories [...]
Marie Antoinette couldn’t get her head around the concept that peasants might resent a lack of bread. I mean, look at her bedroom! So, eventually, her head was forced to observe the resentment in a more detached manner. The Versailles life-style was unsustainable, even if the people living in Versailles thought they could stall the [...]
Christmas Eve represents an immovable endpoint to the busiest time of my wife’s year. As a piano studio director who also runs a charitable foundation, projects and performances crowd into December. So, it has become “traditional” in our family to stagger exhausted to the Christmas holidays and semi-hibernate until after New Year’s Day in order [...]
The response to trauma is instinctual, even if our instinctual responses are wired individually. God evolved our species’ instincts to do something fast –flee, fight, or freeze — because the lethal nature of most of the dangers that killed humans throughout history is immediately perceptible and requires immediate response. Instincts don’t do as well when [...]
Well, not really. However, with recent reports that the US birthrate has fallen to a level not seen since 1920, one starts to speculate. As Pew’s research organization reports: “The U.S. birth rate dipped in 2011 to the lowest ever recorded, led by a plunge in births to immigrant women since the onset of the [...]
In my last post on natural law, I focused on how changing minor “precepts” might make tremendous impacts on our theological understandings. I used cosmological models from general relativity to illustrate the point. Today, I want to look at things a little less, well, cosmically, and review how changing scientific “precepts” over the last few [...]
Mormonism comes with its own science. So does any brand of mainstream Christianity, but many such Christians are unaware of how their creeds embed the assumptions of the “scientists” and mathematicians of antiquity. They can consequently perform a mental jujitsu of preserving the religious idea as metaphor for modern times while ignoring the fact that [...]
THE DOCTOR: Colonel Manton, I want you to tell your men to run away. COLONEL MANTON: What? THE DOCTOR: Those words. “Run away.” I want you to be famous for those exact words. I want people to call you Colonel Runaway. I want children laughing outside your door, ’cause they’ve found the house of Colonel [...]
Let’s face it. Although morality profoundly impacts American’s political views — making political and election issues an inevitable topic of attention for a Mormon blog — the idea of a Mormon being elected President of the United States has animated discussion on this site much more than would a contest between Barack Obama and a [...]
Not the program you might think. Rather, the kind of program some people had in mind for Salman Rushdie when he pointed out the contradictions of “The Satanic Verses”. Or, perhaps that should be pogrom, since there are death penalties involved. Certainly, Mark Steyn is one who has had his proverbial skin in the game, [...]
Unable to sleep a few nights ago, I sought mind-deadening through cable TV. I chanced upon a movie I thought would do the job — a murder mystery set in a mountain abbey in 14th Century Italy. I didn’t get what I expected. Instead, the movie, The Name of the Rose, starring Sean Connery and [...]
My wife seldom takes me to a movie, and never to a documentary. So I was truly amazed last Sunday when she impulsively bought tickets to the documentary 2016: Obama’s America for a showing less than three hours in the future. I was already familiar with the books on which the documentary was based, and hadn’t [...]
I have been personally (and later professionally) interested in the extent to which mathematics could help forecast historical trends ever since I read the fiction of Isaac Asimov way back in the 1960′s. When I shared my first office at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory with a staff meteorologist working on air quality dispersion [...]
“There is but one Lord of the Ring, and he does not share power!” — Gandalf to Saruman. Hawkgrrrl recently summarized Jonathan Haidt’s thesis, expressed in The Righteous Mind, of how people develop pronounced liberal or conservative tendencies as a combination of both genetics and experience (see here). I also wrote about Haidt’s ideas about how [...]
Peter Pan was a wonderful story for me as a six-year old when the Broadway show was first televised by NBC to help market the new-fangled color TVs. Even though we didn’t have the money for color TV, seeing pirates and flying children cavort above the stage even in black-and-white made the program then the [...]
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